Fixing Wikipedia's help pages one key to editor retention

Peter Coombe is a community fellow with the Wikimedia Foundation who is researching help pages. He is also an editor on English Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikinews under the username the wub.

The views expressed in this op-ed are those of the author only. Readers are invited to respond or offer critical commentary in the comments section, while those wishing to author their own op-ed may use the Signpost's opinion desk.

Much like article content, the English Wikipedia's help pages have grown organically over the years. Although this has produced a great deal of useful documentation, with time many of the pages have become poorly maintained or have grown overwhelmingly complicated. There are several issues with the current network of help pages:

• Too long. Wikipedia:Citing sources is one of the most viewed of all help pages, and it's more than 8000 words long.
• Widely varying complexity. If you're a new user who wants to learn what the "edit summary" box is for, you're probably not interested in precisely which MediaWiki message defines the autogenerated summary for page blanking. But we told you anyway (at least we used to—thankfully someone has removed this now).
• Accumulated cruft. Early on in my fellowship I found a help page that was just about how to draw chemical structures using ASCII art. So I thought, that's quaint, it's from 2003, obviously things were a bit different then. I checked with the people at WikiProject Chemicals, and it turns out ASCII art was never encouraged. This was just someone's random page, in Wikipedia space, telling people how to do something that had always been against guidelines. (It was deleted).
• Navigation is poor. One thing people complain about is that after they arrive at a useful page, it's often hard to find it again. A pattern we see over and over is people adding links on their own userpage when they find useful pages, building their own navigation system, so that they don't lose the useful page. People really shouldn't have to resort to this: pages should be findable.
• Fragmentation and duplication. We have at least four pages about how to make tables in wiki markup, and it's unclear which is most suitable for a given problem. And they all need to be kept up to date.

For some idea of the scale of the problem, the main help landing page – Help:Contents – now gets around 10,000 hits a day. It's my belief that improving Wikipedia's help system is one of the most important steps we can take to improve editor recruitment and retention. That's why for the past few months I've been working as a Wikimedia community fellow to research how we can improve help pages.

Community project

There were already some community attempts to improve the help pages, such as the Help Project, but sadly they had become fairly inactive. Because improving and maintaining the help pages is such a huge ongoing task, there's no way I can do it on my own, and I really don't want the efforts to end with my fellowship. Therefore I've worked to revive the project: the homepage received a major overhaul, and there's now a monthly newsletter for members and a regularly updated statistics page covering all the pages within scope. (If you want to get involved, or just keep up with the latest developments, do sign up!)

Learning more

The next major step was a large survey, taking in both new and experienced users, to find out what they are looking for help on, how they find it, and what they think of the existing pages. The full results and conclusions are available. Unsurprisingly, "how to use wiki markup" and "how to start a new page" are the most popular topics among new users. What is surprising is that people rate the help on these topics as ok. It's still not great and could certainly use improvement, but it's better than the others. The help topics people really didn't like are how to add references and how to add images. This is fairly consistent across all experience ranges, from newly registered users with no edits to old hands with thousands of edits.

Recently we've also been able to deploy the article feedback tool to help pages. This should allow us to get extremely valuable feedback: until this deployment and the survey I conducted, we really had very little evidence on what users thought of them.

Tutorials

One thing the Help Project created in the past were a couple of "Introduction to ..." tutorials: Introduction to policies and guidelines and Introduction to talk pages. These focused tutorials have a friendly tone and don't overwhelm new users with details. They've been very well received by the new users who find them, so I decided to make the tutorials we do have more prominent, and developed new tutorials in the same vein on topics that the survey suggested would be valuable: Referencing, uploading images, and navigating Wikipedia. These are brand new, so please edit and improve them! But do try to avoid making them too long and detailed, or adding too many links.

"Helped by people"

Probably the clearest finding in the survey is that experienced editors love the results they get from asking questions on another user's talk page, but new users aren't really aware of that as an option. The same is true to a lesser extent of asking questions at the Help Desk, or in IRC, as clinched by one respondent's comment: "I was helped by people, not help pages." The personal touch certainly seems to ease things along, and that's why it's great that we have new initiatives like the Teahouse, and more friendly warning messages that explicitly invite questions on the warner's talk page. Part of my work to redesign the navigation will try to make these question pages more visible to those who could benefit from them. This is particularly true of the Reference Desk, even though the article feedback tool has only been deployed for a few days we have already seen many factual questions appearing in the feedback for help pages.

Making help findable

Over the next month I'll be focusing on the final part of my project: redesigning Help:Contents, the main entry point into our help system. At the moment this page is a mess, with too many subpages, too many links, and not enough explanation. Many of the links that do exist are misleadingly labelled. This was borne out by usability tests I conducted, where people found it difficult to navigate and find the help they were looking for.

A serious problem with Help:Contents is that it has to speak to many different audiences:

• Readers looking for info ("-1" edits). The biggest volume. Not a primary target of the fellowship, but we certainly need to better support them, help them find places like the Reference desk, and maybe we could entice them to edit with calls to action.
• Readers who want editors to fix something. Similar to the above.
• Brand new editors (0–1 edits) looking to get started, most likely with step-by-step tutorials and hand-holding.
• New editors (10–100 edits) looking for specific help on a topic.
• Experienced editors and admins (100+ edits) looking for more advanced help.

At the moment links relevant to these different groups are all mixed together. The aims of the redesign are to better funnel these different users to where they can get the right kind of help, and to better expose the personal help mentioned previously for those who want it—and, one hopes, to make the page look a bit more attractive too! Again I'll be doing usability tests to try to identify any potential problems with the new design, and to confirm that it's better than the existing one.

How to get involved

If you're interested in improving help pages, please do join the Help Project and the discussions on its talk page. There are also some open tasks you could get started on. It's going to be a long haul, but this work is something that could really make a big difference to the future of Wikipedia.

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• THANK YOU for taking on Help:Contents !, Not too long ago, I had to mention something similar in this discussion. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 07:29, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • +1. Much needed, very valuable. --Chriswaterguy talk 13:05, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• At the risk of confusing new editors with a plethora of alternative options, more could be made of the {{Help me}} template. By using it, new editor can ask for help on their own talk pages, without having to worry about whether they're asking the right person. It could perhaps be improved by putting a "request help" link in, say, the toolbar. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 07:54, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes I do like the idea behind that template. We asked about it in the survey but not enough people had used it to get a fair rating of how well it works. So it would definitely be nice to promote it better in the redesign. Perhaps (thinking out loud here) we could make it easier to add as well by using a link that preloads the template onto the users talk page and they just need to add their question. the wub "?!" 17:37, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • How about adding a "get help now" link, letting the user type their question, and adding the question in a help me template on their talkpage, telling the user they will be notified of new answers on their talkpage, and will know when the answer is provided when they get the Orange Bar? While the help pages are badly organised (and need love too), we do excel at providing personal help, as long as we can reach the editor. Martijn Hoekstra (talk) 20:33, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Is the Help:Getting started page ready for use as a welcome? Looks great and I'm eager to use it but I don't want to jump the gun.```Buster Seven Talk 08:35, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Absolutely, you can start using it now. the wub "?!" 17:53, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • Thanks wub. Is there a template? I just copy/pasted the first batch but would prefer a template. ```Buster Seven Talk 21:05, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• This has been true from day one, so kudos here for the effort to fix! Learning wiki is a nightmare. However, the biggest problem to editor retention is the way people are treated.PumpkinSky talk 09:32, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Last year I tried to reorientate Help Contents towards readers and new editors. No, I was told, there are already planty of pages for babysitting the noobs; this page should be about quick access to more advanced topics for editors who already understand the basics. Perhaps I should have been more stubborn but I gave up. Jim.henderson (talk) 14:54, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • I sympathise. It's true that the more advanced topics ought to be findable too, but that shouldn't get in the way of helping readers and new users to the extent it is at the moment. the wub "?!" 17:53, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• It's a nice initiative, but I think WMF should shell out some funding for dedicated developers on this. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 15:18, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • What kind of development work would you like to see around help? Personally I like the idea of adding more help within the software, though to an extent that can be done by volunteers using MediaWiki messages. It's something I'm planning to investigate more after my fellowship ends. the wub "?!" 17:53, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • Simply put, while WMF does not pay for editing content pages, I think it should pay for editing (improving) help pages; this would result in them being improved much faster. --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| reply here} 17:55, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
      • A design which grants good user experience may not be something which crowdsourcing necessarily produces. The image in this article mapping the help pages just seems like something that, for example, Apple would never allow iPhone applications to do. Blue Rasberry (talk) 12:37, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• There is little question on that we can and should improve our help. As a semi regular helper on IRC, I also notice that help with references and images often comes up. I find however that in general, the problem tends to be the actual processes. In case of images, by far the most asked question is 'how do I add this image of a company logo?' The answer is very complicated, because the process is quite complicated. (download file, upload if autoconfirmed, use requested upload if not, provide copyright information, provide fair use rationale, provide trademark information). The general response is 'cant I just link to the thing?'. No amount or quality of help pages will ever change the answer to yes. This will always leave the asker less satisfied. For references the same thing goes. It just is (currently) that complicated. 62.140.137.140 (talk) 16:07, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Yes this is true. There have been some moves forward (specifically the File Upload Wizard and the enabling of RefToolbar for everyone) but many of our processes remain extremely long-winded and hard to explain to a newbie. the wub "?!" 17:53, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• It's quite true that new editors and experienced editors have very different needs, and that experienced editors often "add[] links on their own userpage when they find useful pages, building their own navigation system, so that they don't lose the useful page." That's why I created the Editor's Index to Wikipedia - so that experienced editors had an alternative to building their own navigation system. I hope it is made clear to experienced editors, in any reworking of the help pages, that this resource exists. -- John Broughton (♫♫) 18:54, 11 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• I am so glad to hear that the Help Pages issue is being examined! :) For several years I have felt that the majority of our so-called help pages are a serious embarrassment. I have felt it necessary to tell newbies basically to avoid our help pages, except for Article Wizard and Upload Wizard. I would be very glad if the whole system could be overhauled and streamlined. Perhaps we can do something like having separate "easy" versions for newbies and "advanced" versions for the experienced editors. Invertzoo (talk) 00:06, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• Excellent news, a major overhaul has been LONG overdue, good luck with the task Peter. From my very 1st involvement here in 2005 I have avoided the "help pages" like the plague, they just became the "unhelpful pages" and a massive time sink, mainly due to poor coordination, non existent structure of web site page hierarchy and consequent ineffective and non functional navigation for new (and other) users. My thoughts are; 1) get the navigation issues sorted out first; 2) Tidy up, the documentation, merging and simplifying where needed and also expanding where needed. Just some thoughts. Good luck with the project. --Cactus.man ✍ 18:32, 12 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• In addition to consolidating and rewriting help pages, I think more images and even videos would be extremely helpful for new users. I'm frequently surprised that, for example, a help page on a Wikipedia gadget does not have an image of how it looks like and what it does. 155.201.35.58 (talk) 20:26, 13 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • Another fan of videos here! I found the videos at the Bookshelf for Beginner Wikipedians especially helpful, but it took me a long, long time before I could find them again, since they're on Outreach Wiki.Djembayz (talk) 12:55, 16 September 2012 (UTC)[reply]